What is the best way to make sense of the alternative federated communities?
kavides@kbin.social to 
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 56 points – It's a little daunting to me that in some cases there are 2 or more communities between the federated alternatives; what's the best way to corral these? I had thought I could perhaps subscribe to Lemmy instances on kbin; is that correct? If so, how? Thank you in advance.
Edit: Well, this is sort of embarrassing but when I was searching for the other communities, I was accidentally searching threads instead of magazines and of course not finding anything so that's the answer as to HOW to subscribe [when it comes to kbin]. My point stands, though, that having so many communities is a bit cumbersome. I guess I will let it percolate a bit and see how it feels.
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The migration caused a large jump in the amount of users, and with that you will have disorder and confusion.
But in time, the communities/magazines where people actually congregate in will rise to the top of the lists. That's where you can find the most active discussions. Even now I found myself unsubbing from some of the quiet kbin magazines I found on my first day and subbing to the bigger communities on beehaw and lemmy instead, which works for me because I want that feel.
The beauty of duplicates is if you find that you're being drowned out, you can go to a place where you can have more of a voice, and discussions will be slower paced, or you can start your own. Most people crave simplicity though so realize that not every alternative will be alive; some of them are veritable ghost towns.
With regards to kbin.social itself, I like that it's relatively open and neutral, instead giving users the access to block users/magazines/communities/whole instances as they see fit. As far as I know it hasn't been deferedated by other instances yet, and that's great because you can reach most anything in the Fediverse.
I'm not sure subbing to beehaw communities is smart right now. You have a kbin.social account and beehaw is still federated with kbin, but beehaw defederated a bunch of other large instances because they have open signup. Kbin has open signup too, so it's only a matter of time before they defeferate kbin too
Strictly speaking they defederated due to spam issues, not open signups. (But yes, the open signups made it easier for spammers, so it was an indirect cause.)
They've also stated they intend to re-federate when there are better moderation tools available, so I wouldn't expect Beehaw to end up entirely isolated in the future.
I am staying away from beehaw for that very reason. I regard them as a local bbs.
If it comes to that, they're well within their rights to. At the moment I'm at 152 subscriptions to different places on the Fediverse, which are close analogs/outright migrations of the same subreddits I once browsed. Only 10 of those are on beehaw, so if I get cut off from those, I'll go elsewhere.